Philip Sulidae – Ramshead

Rumble of thunder and patter of rain. An omnipresent buzzing. Faint gleams and chinks unravel in a snowball of activity, wind in the trees, swirling of air, shuffling, ringing and low rumble. Common everyday chaos. Things calm down somewhat, faint rushing and hissing, swish of what might be distant traffic; small scrapes and buzzes. Philip Sulidae wants you to be here — it’s not entirely clear where here is, but it’s definitely somewhere, a place that’s maybe a little wild, where the sounds of weather and vegetation are louder than those of human activity.

These sounds don’t form a clear narrative, nor do they offer a forensic description of a place — too dense, too changeable for that. An intentional failure to reduce a place to an easily graspable abstraction. Crunch. Plink. Plop. Creak. Hissing static, some kind of chirruping — maybe this bit is a hydrophone recording? Gritty, dirty noise, like a raging forest fire, whistling wind, lots of activity. Sudden quietness, small taps on wood: perhaps we are now inside the Dogman Hut of the title? Or: stop trying to identify what you’re hearing and just hear it. Be surrounded by it, in it. Does it matter if that was the distant clamour of ducks or if you just imagined or misheard it. What counts as mishearing. How do you feel? Immersed, buffeted, transported.

A bird cawing; more cawing; more birds, many birds, a cacophony, quite an ugly, grating sound. As if the sound was required to conform to some abstract human ideal of beauty. No, it conforms to a place — a place that may only exist inside Philip Sulidae’s head, a place made from layers of fragments all jumbled together and bent out of shape, like language. A place worth spending time in.